The present invention relates to data displays, and more specifically concerns apparatus and method for equalizing the appearance of characters having different attributes or display modes.
Many present data-processing displays allow alphanumeric character images to be presented with different "display attributes", such as highlighting, blinking, and normal/reverse mode. In this last mode, the images can be selectively displayed as either bright characters on a dark background (normal video) or as dark characters on a bright background (reverse video).
A problem which occurs especially in raster-scanned cathode-ray-tube (CRT) displays is that the vertical character strokes appear significantly narrower in the reverse mode than they do in the normal mode. This asymmetry is coupled with the fact that the horizontal strokes are not narrowed, which further unbalances the reversed character images. In an age when many people spend hours at a video display, the human factors of the character images become very important; seeming design details may make the difference between job satisfaction and constant discomfort or even physical illness.